Hearing that J. M. Coetzee had won the Nobel Prize in Literature, the perv has been acquainting himself with Coetzee's work. He is enjoying Coetzee's memoir of his boyhood in South Africa, Boyhood. Below are excerpts from chapter Two.
"What happens at school is that boys are flogged. It happens every day. Boys are ordered to bend over and touch their toes and are flogged with a cane.
He has a classmate in Standard Three named Rob Hart whom the teacher particularly loves to beat. The Standard Three teacher is an excitable woman with hennaed hair named Miss Oosthizen . . .
Miss OOsthuizen flies into rages, calls Rob Hart out from his desk, orders him to bend and flogs him across the buttocks. The blows come fast one upon another with barely time for the cane to swing back. By the time Miss Oosthuizen has finished with him, Rob Hart is flushed in the face. But he does not cry; in fact, he may be flushed only because he was bending. Miss Oosthuizen, on the other hand, heaves at her breast and seems on the brink of tears- - of tears and other outpourings too.
After these spells of ungoverned passion the whole class is hushed, and remains hushed until the bell rings.
Miss Oosthuizen never succeeds in making Rob Hart cry; perhaps that is why she flies into such rages at him and beats him so hard, harder than anyone else. Rob Hart is the oldest boy in the class, nearly two years older than himself (he is the youngest); he has a sense that between Rob Hart and Miss Oosthuizen, there is something that he is not privy to.
Rob Hart is tall and handsome in a devil-may-care way . . . Rob Hart is part of a world he has not yet found a way of entering: a world of _s_e_x_ and beating.
. . . Every teacher at his school, man or woman, has cane and is at liberty to use it. Each of these canes has a personality, a character, which is known to the boys and talked about endlessly. In a a spirit of knowing connoisseurship the boys weigh up the characters of the canes and the quality of pain they give, compare the arm and wrist techniques of the teachers who weild them. No one mentions the shame of being called out and made to bend and being beaten on one's backside.
Without experience of his own he cannot take part in these conversations. . . He puts the blame on his mother for not beating him. . .
Among the canes it is not Miss Oosthuizen's that leaves the deepest impression [Coetzee doesn't seem to intend a bad pun here]impression on him. The most fearsome cane is that of Mr. Lategan the woodwork teacher. Mr. Lategan's cane is not long and springy in the style most teachers prefer. Instead it is short and thick and stubby, more a stick or a baton than a switch. It is rumoured that with his cane, Mr. Lategan has made even Matric boys blubber and plead for mercy and urinate in their pants and disgrace themselves.
Mr. Lategan is a little man with close-cropped hair that stands upright and a moustache. One of his thumbs is missing: the stub is neatly covered over with a purple scar. Mr. Lategan hardly says anything. He is always in a distant, irritable mood, as though teaching woodwork to small boys is a task beneath him that he performs unwillingly. Through most of the lessons, he stands at the window staring out over a quadrangle while the boys tentatively measure and saw and plane. Sometimes he has the stubby cane with him, idly tapping his trouser leg while he ruminates . . .
It is permitted for boys to joke with teachers about their canes. In fact this is one area in which a certain teasing of teachers is permitted. 'Make him sing sir!' say the boys, and Mr. Gouws will flash his wrist and his long cane (the longest cane in the school, though Mr. Gouws is only the Standard Five teacher) will whistle through the air.
No one jokes with Mr. Lategan. There is awe of Mr. Lategan, of what he can do with his cane to boys who are almost men.
When his father and his father's brothers get together on the farm at Christmas, talk almost always turns to their schooldays. They reminisce about their schoolmasters and their schoolmasters' canes; they recall cold winter mornings when the cane raise blue weals on their buttocks and the sting would linger for days in the memory of the flesh. In their words there is a note of nostalgia and pleasurable fear. He listens avidly but makes himself as inconspicuous as possible. He does not want them to turn to him, in some pause in the conversation, and ask about the place of the cane in his own life. He has never been beaten and is deeply ashamed of it. He cannot talk about canes in the easy, knowing way of these men.